


far beyond, where the horizon lies

by lutzaussi



Series: where are you going? [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Confusion, Gen, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-11
Updated: 2017-11-11
Packaged: 2019-01-31 17:01:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12686349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lutzaussi/pseuds/lutzaussi
Summary: Iruka is lost; Iruka is found, unintentionally and unknowingly.





	far beyond, where the horizon lies

“Where did you come from?” he asked Sumire on his eleventh birthday, after they had spent the day digging up the garden for sowing.

She paused, leaned on the rake she was breaking clods of dirt with. “I was born in the Land of Waves, but that was many years ago.” She was over fifty by then, still spry but beginning to slow. “I lived there for some years, before I came here; I watched my parents die, and I left. There was nothing for me there; I wanted to make a life of my own.”

She resumed working, and Iruka slowly followed her lead. Perhaps he could make a life there, in the house in the woods.

-

Even when he was young, Iruka had always been big, and growing up hefting sheep and goats over his shoulders made him broad and strong.

Most days Sumire left him to watch over the flock--he was meticulous and never lost a kid or a lamb. When the days were rainy or chilly enough to warrant it, he would get up early to feed them.

Life took a gradual shape, once he settled. He had the goats and sheep, first only two of each, then a paired half-dozen. Sumire left those to him, once he knew how to care for them; she concerned herself with the gardens, which were vast and, at least at the beginning, untamed. Much as the house had been.

That, too, had changed.

-

Like his recovery, as he now referred to that dark time, it was gradual. The wings of the house were infested with rodents, dank and musty even during the crisp clean days of spring. The roof, collapsed in places.

Sumire had started it, working on the main body of the house. Her hands were practiced with wood, her skills those of a master carpenter dedicated to restoration. Those same hands gently taught Iruka how to wield a saw, a hammer, a chisel.

She was like a parent to him, when he had none.

-

He took down one of the wings of the house completely two years after his parents had died. He couldn’t ruminate; he had spent so much time doing that the first year, the first anniversary, that he felt he would go mad if he spent another minute considering the past.

Iruka needed to move, to occupy himself as completely as he could. So he tore down the sagging structure, sorting the materials so Sumire could reuse them as she saw fit to patch the gaping holes he was leaving. The weather was mild, that October, and when he was done in the early hours of the morning he collapsed, stared up at the star-littered sky.

-

The next year he did the same to the other wing of the house, stripped the support columns and the thatching on the roof, piled the lumber where Sumire would go through it. The barn was half-built; they kept the four livestock in the house when it got particularly cold.

The house decreased to three rooms, and a tiled bathroom pocked from years of misuse and holding hooved animals during the winter. Walls went up where once there had been grand wings, and the garden grew to accommodate the empty spaces.

He learned how to tile when he was fifteen, and re-thatch a roof at sixteen. By seventeen he could deliver breech lambs with Sumire’s help, and at eighteen he could run their entire household by himself, if needed.

-

The years passed; grief and pain dulled to aches. The aches would flare every year, but Iruka came to accept that. It was better than forgetting what he had come from, better than forgetting what he had made of himself.

-

Eleven years after the death of his parents, after he had left Konohagakure and been taken in by Sumire, even the ache of remembering was beginning to dull.

He woke up early on that anniversary. The day was silent, freezing. The icy ground crunched under his boots, dead grass and leaves alike coated with frost as he left Sumire to sleep in. He had just made it to the barn housing all of the animals when a conspiracy of ravens took wing, back in the woods a ways.

That in itself was not strange; Iruka ignored the birds and continued with his chores, feeding the sheep and goats.

The ravens were still in an uproar when he left the barn, headed back to the house. If they were still there, he decided, when he finished helping Sumire clean up after breakfast, he would go check to see if anything was there. It wouldn’t do to leave a dead or dying animal in the woods, particularly so close to their own livestock.

-

The frost had stayed thick in the hour it had taken for him to eat and help Sumire clean up. In fact, the puffy white clouds that portended snow were rapidly moving in.

Iruka took the trail behind the house and barn slowly, testing each rock to make sure he wouldn’t slip on ice. Winter had come upon them quickly. The ravens hurried him on his way despite his slowness; they would take flight and re-settle, making their obnoxious honking and cawing noises as he continued on the path.

Only when he had made it about a kilometer from the house did he start to hear the other noises, quiet whining and occasional scratching. That was enough to make him hesitate; wolves did live in the area, as did one or two coyotes. He didn’t want to run into either of those.

The whining only increased as he continued, and his pace dropped further speed. Could it be a dog? It sounded unlike the wolves, which usually only howled, or snarled and barked at each other. He hadn’t seen dogs in years, but he thought that the sounds he heard were what they sounded like.

-

A whole pack of dogs, varying in size from as tall as him to small enough for him to carry like a lamb. Iruka blinked at them, surprise and worry knotting in his stomach as eight sets of eyes turned to him. They looked sad, if dogs could look sad.

“He could help us,” one of the dogs said, and uneasiness was added to the knots growing in his stomach. He knew that dogs capable of talking were ninken, dogs trained by shinobi.

“Maybe,” the smallest, the one with the squished face, answered.

“Help you with what?” Iruka asked. His throat felt sore, as it often did when the air turned dry and chilly.

The dogs glanced down at the smallest one, apparently their leader. At it’s nod, they parted, revealing a man battered and bloody. Iruka couldn’t tell if he was breathing; he could tell that he was still bleeding.

-

Raising sheep and goats meant that Iruka was experienced at emergency first aid, both for himself and the animals. The injuries to the man were above his skill level, but he did his best to realign a broken arm, stop bleeding from half a dozen deep cuts, and pull what appeared to be most of a branch out of his abdomen.

Only once he had made sure the man wasn’t going to die did he go and find Sumire. She didn’t even need a reason to follow him, once she saw the blood slicking his hands.

Snow fell as they made a makeshift pallet and carefully transported the man into the house. The dogs followed them, every step of the way, and it was only when they went to take the man’s shredded clothes off that Iruka realised the symbol on his headband, and those of the dogs’, to be Konoha’s.

-

It took them hours to clean the man and dress all of his wounds. Even where there was no tearing or cutting of skin, purple and black bruises marred his pale, nearly transparent skin. The process of pulling out the splinters embedded in the man’s wrecked abdomen was the task that Sumire gave to Iruka, while she sewed up the cuts and tears.

They did the work in the bathroom, where all of the blood could be washed from the tile. The oil lamps had to be refilled by the time they were done, and the man was suitably bandaged.

Another pallet had to be made, and they took the man into the main room, where both of them slept when the air began to turn cold. He was positioned right next to the fire, and the dogs allowed to lay with him, bring his body temperature back up to normal. Iruka hesitantly started food for them all; he didn’t know what the dogs would eat, being ninken and all, but he needn’t have worried. They ate what he gave them and disappeared one by one, until only the smallest was left.

“Thank you for helping us,” the dog said in its low, gravely voice. “I didn’t--well, thank you. Not many would do what you did.”

Iruka looked up from tying his boots on. Part of him, the confused part that had begun to desperately want to know who the man was, screamed to ask the dog all manner of questions. The rest told him to stay distant, so he nodded. “I would not leave someone to die.”

He could feel the dog’s eyes on him as he left to check the sheep, and when he returned those same eyes stared at him as he shrugged off his coat and went to bed.

-

The man was unconscious for three days. The small dog stayed all that time, lying next to the man as if they had become fused.

Iruka wanted to go about his life as usual, but something about the presence of the man and his dog left him feeling uneasy, on edge. Scars crisscrossed the man’s body, evidence for him having a long career as a shinobi. One of his eyes was not his, instead a dojutsu that Iruka vaguely remembered as that of the Uchiha. And his hair--shocking, silver white. He had to be someone of importance; his appearance seemed familiar somehow.

It left a bad taste in his mouth, just thinking about it, so Iruka tried not to.

-

Iruka became aware the of the man’s regained consciousness in the worst of ways. He had gone to check the livestock later than usual, Sumire already in her futon and asleep when he laced on his boots and trudged the short path to the barn.

More snow was falling when he walked back, and he was preoccupied with thoughts of the next day when he heard creaking. He was bodily pushed against the wall, smacking the back of his head with enough force to dizzy him. A thin, bandaged hand pressed against his mouth, and cold steel pressed against his throat.

“Who are you?” the man hissed. Sumire didn’t stir from her futon, and Iruka helplessly grabbed at the wall behind him. “Where am I?”

“You’re,” he stuttered, when the man has removed the hand from his mouth, “y-you’re a week out from Konohagakure. Probably shorter.” He could feel himself trembling. Where was the dog? Why hadn’t the dog told him anything? Those thoughts fled as the knife at his throat pressed closer. Maybe at one time he thought himself suitable for life as a shinobi, but in that moment he just wanted to survive and be able to continue his life in the house with his sheep and goats and Sumire. “Near--near Land of Waves.”

The man pulled back, but kept the knife in his hand well in Iruka’s eyesight. “My things?”

“There,” Iruka doesn’t point; he nods in the direction of the clothes and bags. He’d patched the clothing as best he could the night before, while Sumire had been pickling some of the stored vegetables, but they were still little better than rags.

Despite that, despite everything, the man pulled them on, attached the bags to his back and legs with aching slowness. Iruka wanted to take the knife away, push him back into the futon he’d spent the previous days in, but he felt frozen in place.

-

He tried to forget about the man. At first there were some nightmares, of actually being killed while Sumire remained asleep and oblivious, of finding Sumire dead. But then he would get trapped in thoughts of who the man was, why he had been in the forest near the house, why he was so badly injured.

Those thoughts lessened as weeks and months passed, and by the next spring Iruka had all but forgotten about the man he had saved. Until one morning, as he left the house to take the animals out to graze. On the door there was a note held by the throwing needle, and under it a small bag. Iruka took the whole thing down carefully, opened the bag first. In it were neatly rolled bandages, needles and suture floss. That was--strange.

He unfolded the paper, smoothed it. “I am sorry for my actions of last year,” Iruka read the note aloud, but in a soft voice so Sumire wouldn’t hear him. “I can offer no excuses, especially in the face of your kindness by taking me in and caring for me. In the bag are replacements for the bandages and stitches. If possible, I would like to stop by to make a formal apology; my conduct has been inappropriate for that of a Konohagakure shinobi.”

Iruka looked up from the paper, faintly decided he needed to tell Sumire.

-

Iruka half-expected the man to not go through. He didn’t expect for a shinobi to return solely to thank him,  _ them _ , for helping him.

So when there was a knock on the front door four days after he found the note, Iruka had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.  _ In what world do shinobi care about these things? _ he wondered as he went to check it, feeling worried.

His world, apparently, because the white-haired man was standing outside the house.

-

Sumire was the host, the gracious host, and Iruka spent the next half hour in near-shock. The man smoothly introduced himself as Hatake Kakashi--the name sounded familiar, Iruka didn’t know why--and had once again profusely thanked the two of them for saving him from certain death.

Iruka let Sumire talk to the man, to Kakashi, as long as she wanted, and then took him to the door, still in something of a daze.

“You know,” Hatake Kakashi said as they paused in the entrance, putting his sandals back on. Iruka was almost terrified of what he might say. “I was threatening you, but you never did tell me what your name is.”

That is enough to snap Iruka out of his daze. Yes, he’d been threatened. He chose his next words carefully, hoping that the shinobi would take it with good grace, “It doesn’t seem that you’ve done anything worthy of knowing my name, in that case.”

If he’s not mistaken, the man actually smiles at that before disappearing.


End file.
